A true Lady and a brave spy: The remarkable story of the Queen Mother’s close friend

YESTERDAY, beneath a grey February sky, one of the most formidable women in recent history was discreetly laid to rest at Sunningdale in Berkshire.

Lady Marie-Jose Villiers – known as Jose – died in an Ascot nursing home on February 1, aged 98. Yet many of her fellow residents may not have known that they had a much decorated Second World War spy within their midst, such was her enduring modesty.

Awarded numerous medals for her work with the Belgian Resistance, she escaped with her life where many of her comrades were killed by the Gestapo. In a rare magazine interview in 1997, Lady Villiers – who was born in Sussex in 1916 but grew up in Belgium – described how she came to be a spy.

“My family’s chateau had been taken over by Italian offi cers and they were quite amazingly lax with their security. They would tell me all about their airfi elds and even took us to show us their aircraft,” she said.

At the time, she was working for the Red Cross Motor Corps driving ambulances.

“An old friend of the family who was working for the underground suggested that I was in a perfect position to gather information and it developed from there. I was trained to recognise all the different aircraft by their silhouettes, to draw target maps and so on. In the end I was in charge of the whole aviation section of our group, Service Zero.

“We had letter boxes set up at various locations where you would drop your information. I used to keep intelligence material in the bottom of my silver cross, which unscrewed, but sometimes when I had bigger maps of target sites I had to stuff them in my underwear and hope for the best!

“But it was very hard. The Gestapo were really horrid. In the end, one just had to think of one’s duty and the ultimate goal of freeing our country.”

When her cover was blown in late 1942, Countess Marie Jose de la Barre d’Erquelinnes, as she was at the time, had to flee on foot through the Pyrenees. Many of her fellow agents were captured, tortured and killed.

Having made her way to Britain she worked for Belgian Emergency Relief, then for the American Army as a liaison officer. Come October 1946 she married recently widowed British banker Charles Villiers – who was knighted in 1975 – and they had two daughters, Diana and Anne.

In 1978 they survived an IRA letter bomb sent to their home – the intuition which served her brilliantly as a spy led her to call the police when the package arrived.

She met Mother Teresa on a trip to India, and worked with underprivileged families in London’s East End for more than 20 years as a school care worker.

Her common touch was a legacy of her father taking her down coal mines and to visit the poor, so determined was he that his family should appreciate their aristocratic life.

But it wasn’t until 1988 that she finally put pen to paper about her wartime experiences to write her book Granny Was A Spy.

The title was inspired by the words uttered by one of her seven grandchildren after she regaled him with her wartime stories as a young boy.

Speaking to me from Lady Villiers’ Windsor home, Blacknest House, on the eve of her funeral, her son-in-law Tom Martin said that she retained her quick wittedness until the end.

“Unfortunately after a recent fall she had to go into a nursing home last November, but even then, when she was barely able shuffle around on her frame, she managed to get the code to the front door and escape,” says Tom, 71, who worked in the motor industry and is married to Lady Villiers’ daughter Anne, 65, who previously worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan before returning to academia.

She is now clerk of the parish council. Her sister older Diana, a lawyer, is married to former US deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and lives in Washington DC.

“They are two very feisty women very much in the mould of their mother,” Tom continues.

He met Anne – the second marriage for both of them - in 1992 when they lived in Oxford. At the time Lady Villiers’ husband Charles was dying from cancer.

“I first met Jose after his death. I wasn’t aware of her background until Anne and I got married in 1993.

“She really didn’t talk that much about her life as a spy. She was very much into what was happening in the world today. You almost had to drag the stories out of her, she wasn’t a woman who talked about herself; she was extremely modest and more interested in other people.

“Anne and I moved to a guest house in the grounds of Blacknest House about 12 years ago when we felt she was beginning to need someone near her – we were wrong, she still went partying. “Jose was good fun but if you played bridge with her and didn’t take it sufficiently seriously she would have thrown you out.

“But she behaved impeccably with beautiful old fashioned manners and would be the first person to volunteer to drive people to where they needed to go, clean the church or help friends.” One of those friends was the Queen Mother.

Lady Villiers once revealed in an interview how the pair became close: “I first met her in about 1946 after I married Charles. He had known the (Royal) family for years and used to go to a singing group that King George held at the palace. We were invited to a party there and I was introduced to her then. We met again at several luncheons and at one of them I told her we had just moved into Blacknest House, which is very near to Royal Lodge. She said that she would like to come and see it and our friendship grew from there.”

Tom is guarded when I ask more about Lady Villiers’ relationship with the Queen Mother. “I met her (the Queen Mother). She was a fantastic lady, absolutely wonderful. They both had an incredible sense of humour and lunch with the pair of them was a laugh a minute. But Jose was very protective of her relationship with the Royals.”

Lady Villiers died at Ascot Priory, the residential care home where she’d lived since November, and the home’s director, Fidelma Tinneny, says she made quite an impression on her new friends there.

“She was an absolute delight to care for,” she says. “Although she did tell her stories of being a spy she was far more interested in other people. When you asked about her life she would say, ‘No, no, tell me about you!’

“She was stoic and despite her privileged background she was exceptionally down to earth. While she was here she loved very ordinary things – a cup of tea and a slice of cake, or a chat with someone in the gardens. “She was amazing, absolutely incredible, a very strong, resilient, capable lady. Yes, ‘a lady’ is the right term to describe her.”